Her Final Confession

Chapter Forty-Seven

“What happened after Billy was killed?” Josie asked.

Starkey sipped on his fourth beer. “She didn’t have anywhere to go, and she couldn’t go back home. There was a female officer on Seattle PD, a uniform, who took pity on Gretchen. Gave her a couch to sleep on for a week or two. Then someone tried to break into the officer’s house.”

“Let me guess,” Josie offered. “By prying open a window?”

“Bingo. That was the Strangler’s MO. Anyway, Gretchen found people to stay with, but every time she moved, something would happen. Someone would try to break in, or she would get… phone calls.”

“What kind of phone calls?”

“It was him. He always found out where she was, and he’d call for her—they eventually figured out he was calling from pay phones.” He chuckled. “Remember those?”

“Vaguely,” Josie joked.

“Well, he would call and taunt her. For a while, the police tried to use her as bait. They stayed wherever she was, waited for him to call, tried to track him. It never worked out. She came to me and told me how she thought the killer was in law enforcement. We checked out every guy we could on the Seattle PD, but none of them looked good for the Strangler. So we tried hiding her.”

“The ATF?”

“Nah, not officially. It was just a bunch of us guys who knew Billy. We knew he would want us to help her. We kept moving her around, letting her stay at our houses, but the windows kept turning up disturbed and the phone calls went on. Originally, since she was such an important witness, the Seattle PD had to know where she was at all times. Then we decided we wouldn’t tell them anything. That if they needed her for anything, they could call me, and I’d bring her to them. It stopped after that. That’s what made us think it was Seattle PD. I mean, I guess it could have been ATF, but there were only about four of us handling her safety, and when we stopped reporting her whereabouts to the Seattle PD, the killer stopped his antics.”

“But the Devil’s Blade found her?” Josie asked.

Starkey signaled the waitress and asked for shots of tequila. They waited until she brought them over. Josie declined with a shake of her head. Starkey just shrugged and slugged hers down as well. “When Billy got killed,” he said, “the local police responded. Things moved pretty fast, and somehow it leaked to the press that he was an undercover ATF agent. Believe me, we were not happy, but we never thought that Devil’s Blade would retaliate. I mean, Billy was dead, right? He never got patched in. There was no case. No harm, no foul.”

“But Linc Shore didn’t see it that way,” Josie said.

“Apparently not.”

“How did they get to her if you were protecting her?” Josie asked, keeping her tone as non-accusatory as possible.

Starkey ran a hand over his face. The skin of his cheeks glowed red, whether from memories or alcohol, Josie couldn’t tell. Maybe both. “She had to go home to pack things up. She couldn’t afford rent without Billy. For a couple of days, I dropped her off at the house before I went into the office. One of my colleagues met us there and stayed with her, helped her pack up. It was tough, but she said she wanted to do it. Having someone there with her made her feel better though. She couldn’t stand being there.”

“I don’t know how she could have,” Josie said.

“On the second day, I swung by there around lunchtime to see how they were making out, and she was gone. My buddy was unconscious near the front door, bleeding from his head. I thought he was dead. They cracked his skull. He had quite a long recovery. Didn’t remember a damn thing about what happened. His gun was a few feet from his body, and his wrist was broken. He never got off a shot. House was all torn up like there’d been a struggle. There was a ripped piece of a Devil’s Blade bandana in the living room. We don’t know if it was Billy’s from before, or if it was from her trying to fight off the Devil’s Blade guys.”

Again, Josie had to think long and hard about having a real drink. She couldn’t imagine being so young, having just lost your husband in a brutal home invasion, being taunted by his killer, and then being kidnapped by an outlaw biker gang. On one hand, Josie wondered if any one person could truly have such horrible luck. On the other hand, Billy’s undercover assignment had put him and Gretchen at risk. Had she not been married to him, and had his true identity not been leaked, she would have been able to put her life back together without the added violence and trauma.

Starkey continued, “But we found out pretty fast they had her. Like I said, through informants. I pulled out all the stops. We kept it out of the press though. We didn’t want the Strangler to know we had lost the star witness against him. As far as he knew, she was still in hiding.”

“But you didn’t find her,” Josie said. “They let her go.”

Starkey nodded. The waitress returned with the bottle of tequila, and Starkey touched her arm. “I’ll pay for the bottle, sweetheart,” he told her.

With a smile, she put it on the table. She shot Josie a subtle raised-brow look and pointedly asked her, “Anything I can get you, Sugar?”

Josie smiled. “I’m fine, thank you. I’ll let you know.”

With a nod, the waitress left them, and Starkey poured more shots, drinking them down as he continued his story. “A couple times we thought we had good leads, but they didn’t pan out. Then one day they dumped her in front of the building. Early morning. ’Round 5 a.m. Tossed her like a sack of potatoes. We had CCTV of it, but it was grainy, and we couldn’t make out the license plates of the bikes. But we knew it was the Devil’s Blade.”

“How long did you say she was gone?”

“Thirteen months.”

“Why did they let her go?” Josie asked, although she knew Starkey wouldn’t really have the answer to this. Only Gretchen and Linc Shore knew why Devil’s Blade had let her go after thirteen months in captivity. Linc Shore was dead, and Gretchen wasn’t talking. She wanted Starkey’s theory.

He took two more shots. The amber liquid of the tequila sloshed over this time and dribbled down his chin. “Don’t know,” he said.

Josie waited for more, but Starkey offered nothing. She said, “I’m sure they kill plenty of people. Make them disappear. Why did they let her live?”

His eyes were glassy now. Josie had lost track of just how much he had had to drink, but the tequila bottle had only a finger left in it. “I can’t figure,” he said. “It’s always bothered me. Gretchen would never talk about that time.”

She wondered if he really had no theory after twenty-five years, or if he was just too drunk now to comment. With a sigh, she said, “Why did you ask me to come here? You could have told me these things over the phone.”

He reached across the table as if to grasp her hand, but Josie put both her hands in her lap. “The Strangler is still out there,” Starkey said. “I mean, he could be dead, but we thought he was dead before, and he came back. With the law-enforcement connection… Gretchen was really paranoid. She made me promise if I ever talked with anyone in law enforcement about the case, that I would check them out first. No matter how much time had passed. I had to meet you. Make sure you were really who you said you were.”

This sounded dubious, and he must have seen the skepticism on Josie’s face, because he said, “You don’t understand what it was like for her. He always found her. Always.”

“What about when she moved back East?” Josie asked. “Did he ever make contact?”

“I don’t know. If he did, she never told me. We lost touch…” He trailed off, his eyes tracking the waitress across the room, his tongue flicking along his lips. Josie wondered if they’d lost touch or if Gretchen had cut off contact. She also wondered if the Soul Mate Strangler had in fact followed Gretchen to Pennsylvania. If not all those years ago, perhaps more recently.

She needed more information about the killer and his victims, but clearly Starkey had reached the limits of his own usefulness.

Good thing for Josie she knew just who to ask.